Finance committee  Come on.

Finance committee  We have 10,000.

Finance committee  Absolutely. We've heard for many years that we need to diversify our exports. That strategy has worked, because now we're less dependent on the United States than we used to be before. That is working. We just need to be more aggressive in certain regions. I think Asia is the nex

Finance committee  Doing trade deals.

Finance committee  Well, the whole sector is 1.7 million. I would estimate maybe about 200,000 are members at present, because not all manufacturers are members of ours.

Finance committee  I think for a long time we've had an economy structured by a low currency. When you have lower labour costs, you don't need as much automation as when you have higher labour costs. Some other countries, and we talk about Germany and the U.S., have been coping with high currencies

Finance committee  In terms of studies, I would be careful with that, because there are lots of studies. There are people saying if we have a high dollar, we should have a lot of investment in machinery and equipment. Well, that's only part of the story, because what's really driving investment, an

Finance committee  Of our members, 57% say that they are facing labour problems that are limiting their ability to consider expanding, to produce and sell more. However, I do not at all share the view that the income splitting measure would automatically have a negative effect. Income splitting is

Finance committee  That is very important. As you said, not only are we a globalized economy, but we're also a small country in a global world. In talking about entrepreneurs and small businesses, very often when some of our members make a new product, they have to export. The market is not big eno

Finance committee  You're right. I think Canada's is now the lowest in the G-7 by far. As I said, I think the structure of our economy is also more dependent upon small businesses than may be the case in some other countries. We haven't seen a huge shift in our sector, but definitely the large co

Finance committee  There are two things. In general, the shorter the time for depreciation, the more incentive you have to renew your machinery and equipment over that period of time. That's the first one. The second thing, as I said, is that now that we have a 10-year stable tax measure instead of

Finance committee  I'll just give you a statistic. In Canada, for every hour of work, we produce $45 of goods. In Germany and the United States, it's over $60 of goods for the same hour. If you don't invest in machinery and equipment, you'd better be in a low-cost jurisdiction for labour, because o

Finance committee  As I said, 85% of our members are SMEs, and I totally agree with that. I'm a small business owner myself and nobody in our sector will say that they don't want to grow their business because their going to pay more taxes. There are going to be more taxes, because you're going to

Finance committee  Yes, the capital expenditure has been eliminated from the tax rate this year, January 1—

Finance committee  —as a decision of the Conservative government following the Jenkins report. We hear about it a lot because a lot of the R and D in our sector is dependent more and more on capital, on machinery and equipment, as I said: additive manufacturing, automation, all these things. Yes